What do you think?
Rate this book
In Other Words: Essays Toward a Reflexive Sociology
This volume of interviews, lectures and informal talks provides an introduction to Bourdieu's work and highlights some of the issues which are at the forefront of the sociology of culture today. Bourdieu situates his work in relation to those thinkers who were influential in the formation of his views, from Marx and Durkheim to Levi-Strauss and Wittgenstein and retraces the development of his ideas from his early ethnographic studies to his most recent work on the sociology of cultural fields. He responds to some of the criticisms which have been made of his work and offers his own criticisms of some of his contemporaries, including Althusser, Foucault and Habermas. The volume also contains contributions to the sociology of symbolic forms of religion and of sport, as well as Bourdieu's inaugral lecture at the College de France.
234 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
14 people are currently reading
375 people want to read
About the author
Pierre Bourdieu
356 books1,341 followersBourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location, and symbolic violence to reveal the dynamics of power relations in social life. His work emphasized the role of practice and embodiment or forms in social dynamics and worldview construction, often in opposition to universalized Western philosophical traditions. He built upon the theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Georges Canguilhem, Karl Marx, Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Erwin Panofsky, and Marcel Mauss. A notable influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal, after whom Bourdieu titled his Pascalian Meditations.
Bourdieu rejected the idea of the intellectual "prophet", or the "total intellectual", as embodied by Sartre. His best known book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, in which he argues that judgments of taste are related to social position. His argument is put forward by an original combination of social theory and data from surveys, photographs and interviews, in an attempt to reconcile difficulties such as how to understand the subject within objective structures. In the process, he tried to reconcile the influences of both external social structures and subjective experience on the individual (see structure and agency).
Bourdieu rejected the idea of the intellectual "prophet", or the "total intellectual", as embodied by Sartre. His best known book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, in which he argues that judgments of taste are related to social position. His argument is put forward by an original combination of social theory and data from surveys, photographs and interviews, in an attempt to reconcile difficulties such as how to understand the subject within objective structures. In the process, he tried to reconcile the influences of both external social structures and subjective experience on the individual (see structure and agency).
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
February 11, 2024
A large part of this book is a series of interviews or papers Bourdieu wrote to explain his idea of reflexive sociology. Now, the mistake people might make with this idea is to think he means reflective sociology – like, looking into a mirror – and while these ideas aren’t a million miles apart, there is a real difference here that you need to understand. He means reflexive in the sense that there are reflexive pronouns. That is, pronouns like myself or ourselves. In a sentence like ‘I wash myself’ the subject of the verb doing the washing and the person being washed are the same person.
So, what is reflexive sociology? Well, basically it is recognising that when you do sociology you always do it from a very particular social location – the one you inhabit – and that it is virtually impossible to do it from another social location – one you would like to imagine you inhabit. This will sound to many people like the dreaded ‘relativism’ and, well, it sort of is. His point is that all of us have certain habits and dispositions (what he calls a habitus) and these become so ingrained with us, from birth, that they form our automatic way of understanding the world. These habits and dispositions are so ingrained that they are in effect part of our body. They make us feel comfortable or uncomfortable in various social situations and in various social groups. Some of which feel perfectly natural to us, others make us feel like running away and hiding.
If we are doing sociology, Bourdieu suggests that it is probably a good idea to notice when we feel completely at home and when we feel like a fish out of water. That way, when we start saying things about those social situations we might notice when what we think of as universally true ideas that all right thinking individuals would immediately agree with are, in fact, little more than a product of our own peculiar upbringing and world.
So, does this amount to relativism – and I think the answer is yes. But a particular kind of relativism. One that is basically unavoidable and therefore demands to be acknowledged. That is, it is clear that someone who has been brought up in the countryside, dirt poor and having attended a local high school will have a very different set of habits and dispositions to someone who was brought up in a very affluent suburb, attended a private school and whose parents took them to the theatre and symphony concerts all their lives. Notice that both of these people will consider their own upbringing as normal, even if they do also acknowledge the advantages and disadvantages of the other person’s upbringing. But even with the greatest expenditure of empathy either of them are capable of, neither will be able to truly see the world through the eyes of the other. And a large part of the reason why will not be due to the obvious things that each notices about the other person, but rather the million or so different ways they understand the smallest of things, things they could never put into words, even if they might eventually even notice the differences.
Bourdieu’s point is that he wants sociology to work as a way to highlight power differences and to help people resist the symbolic violence that society imposes upon us all – regardless of our social position. Bourdieu believes that most of the agony of inequality is normalised in society by symbolic means that match our various habits and dispositions. Whether we are advantaged by these inequalities or disadvantaged makes very little difference to our ultimate acceptance of these. This means that for Bourdieu, the role of sociology is to turn our gaze back upon ourselves in an attempt to see how our own habits and dispositions might help to normalise the structures of society that make some advantaged and others disadvantaged. He calls these structures (or sometimes ‘structuring structures’) symbolic violence – since they enact violence upon people, particularly those who end up being dispossessed by them, but that they are symbolic violence in the sense that they steal from the dispossessed by making them complicit in their own dispossession. If you convince someone that they should be dispossess, they are unlikely to complain about the little they have. Bourdieu says convincing people of the justice of them being dispossessed (or the justice of them being advantaged) is a major role of our social structures. Reflexive sociology allows us to see how these inequalities become naturalised and therefore helps us to see what we would otherwise take for granted.
This is why Bourdieu sees sociology as essentially a form of ethnography. In much the same way as someone going into an alien culture is able to apply an outsider’s eye to the conditions of life of that culture – once one adopts a reflexive understanding of how sociology works, we can then, each of us, apply our vision from our own social location to the relations we experience around ourselves and illuminate these relationships in our own unique ways.
Essentially, there is not an outside of society where a purely objective view can be had of how society itself works. Our best way to understand how society works is to recognise our own unique place within society and to see how the structures of society influence and push and pull us in particular ways – and then to wonder about how those same structures might be experienced by other people with other habits and dispositions.
This isn’t relative in the sense of ‘what I think is true because I think it’ – but rather, my whole life history informs what I’m likely to see and experience and therefore, I need to constantly have an eye out for how I feel certain things are completely natural and other things are strangely bizarre.
This book is quite an easy introduction of Bourdieu’s ideas. I’ve been coming to the conclusion that for Bourdieu reflexivity isn’t quite enough – in the sense that there are many people who hope to bring about a more just world and believe this can be achieved by consciousness raising. I think that for Bourdieu that is never enough. To change the world it is not enough to change how we think about the world (although, this will be necessary too) but, and this explains his fascination with Pascal, we need to fundamentally change how we act in the world. This is, in a way, a rephrasing of Marx’s final thesis on Feuerbach, the philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways, the point, however, is to change it. For Bourdieu, that change is a fundamentally practical action, and cannot be changed by thought alone.
So, what is reflexive sociology? Well, basically it is recognising that when you do sociology you always do it from a very particular social location – the one you inhabit – and that it is virtually impossible to do it from another social location – one you would like to imagine you inhabit. This will sound to many people like the dreaded ‘relativism’ and, well, it sort of is. His point is that all of us have certain habits and dispositions (what he calls a habitus) and these become so ingrained with us, from birth, that they form our automatic way of understanding the world. These habits and dispositions are so ingrained that they are in effect part of our body. They make us feel comfortable or uncomfortable in various social situations and in various social groups. Some of which feel perfectly natural to us, others make us feel like running away and hiding.
If we are doing sociology, Bourdieu suggests that it is probably a good idea to notice when we feel completely at home and when we feel like a fish out of water. That way, when we start saying things about those social situations we might notice when what we think of as universally true ideas that all right thinking individuals would immediately agree with are, in fact, little more than a product of our own peculiar upbringing and world.
So, does this amount to relativism – and I think the answer is yes. But a particular kind of relativism. One that is basically unavoidable and therefore demands to be acknowledged. That is, it is clear that someone who has been brought up in the countryside, dirt poor and having attended a local high school will have a very different set of habits and dispositions to someone who was brought up in a very affluent suburb, attended a private school and whose parents took them to the theatre and symphony concerts all their lives. Notice that both of these people will consider their own upbringing as normal, even if they do also acknowledge the advantages and disadvantages of the other person’s upbringing. But even with the greatest expenditure of empathy either of them are capable of, neither will be able to truly see the world through the eyes of the other. And a large part of the reason why will not be due to the obvious things that each notices about the other person, but rather the million or so different ways they understand the smallest of things, things they could never put into words, even if they might eventually even notice the differences.
Bourdieu’s point is that he wants sociology to work as a way to highlight power differences and to help people resist the symbolic violence that society imposes upon us all – regardless of our social position. Bourdieu believes that most of the agony of inequality is normalised in society by symbolic means that match our various habits and dispositions. Whether we are advantaged by these inequalities or disadvantaged makes very little difference to our ultimate acceptance of these. This means that for Bourdieu, the role of sociology is to turn our gaze back upon ourselves in an attempt to see how our own habits and dispositions might help to normalise the structures of society that make some advantaged and others disadvantaged. He calls these structures (or sometimes ‘structuring structures’) symbolic violence – since they enact violence upon people, particularly those who end up being dispossessed by them, but that they are symbolic violence in the sense that they steal from the dispossessed by making them complicit in their own dispossession. If you convince someone that they should be dispossess, they are unlikely to complain about the little they have. Bourdieu says convincing people of the justice of them being dispossessed (or the justice of them being advantaged) is a major role of our social structures. Reflexive sociology allows us to see how these inequalities become naturalised and therefore helps us to see what we would otherwise take for granted.
This is why Bourdieu sees sociology as essentially a form of ethnography. In much the same way as someone going into an alien culture is able to apply an outsider’s eye to the conditions of life of that culture – once one adopts a reflexive understanding of how sociology works, we can then, each of us, apply our vision from our own social location to the relations we experience around ourselves and illuminate these relationships in our own unique ways.
Essentially, there is not an outside of society where a purely objective view can be had of how society itself works. Our best way to understand how society works is to recognise our own unique place within society and to see how the structures of society influence and push and pull us in particular ways – and then to wonder about how those same structures might be experienced by other people with other habits and dispositions.
This isn’t relative in the sense of ‘what I think is true because I think it’ – but rather, my whole life history informs what I’m likely to see and experience and therefore, I need to constantly have an eye out for how I feel certain things are completely natural and other things are strangely bizarre.
This book is quite an easy introduction of Bourdieu’s ideas. I’ve been coming to the conclusion that for Bourdieu reflexivity isn’t quite enough – in the sense that there are many people who hope to bring about a more just world and believe this can be achieved by consciousness raising. I think that for Bourdieu that is never enough. To change the world it is not enough to change how we think about the world (although, this will be necessary too) but, and this explains his fascination with Pascal, we need to fundamentally change how we act in the world. This is, in a way, a rephrasing of Marx’s final thesis on Feuerbach, the philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways, the point, however, is to change it. For Bourdieu, that change is a fundamentally practical action, and cannot be changed by thought alone.
September 27, 2010
As much as I adore most of the social sciences, probably more so than any of the "hard sciences", I still have to cringe when the word science is used to describe any writer's methodology of sociology, anthropology, or western philosophy. Sociology is a particularly interesting case and point because arbitrary results can occasionally be justified as those of a reliable series of analysis and survey. In other words, scientific method seems based on more reliable and empirical tests and experiments, while sociological method seems to yield less reliable results. Of course, this brings up an entire discussion dealing more with the philosophy of science, and I'm hardly the sort of mind capable of distinguishing or explaining the difference between the two (or three, or four, or five, and so on) here. However, I can appreciate a tone of intellectual honesty when it comes to sociology. It's not so much that I'm expecting these writers to confess to this discipline essentially being a bunch of disreputable guesswork, but for sociologists to at least admit that sociological research is not essentially a science.
Bourdieu still seems to bandy about the word science as if sociology truly was one. Yet his awareness of both what the sociologist means when they say this, as well as the weaknesses of certain influences of his (Levi-Strauss, Durkheim, Weber, Merleau-Ponty, etc) motivates his ideas to step back from themselves and reflect on what sort of foundation of logic and method might stengthen their results. He seems to strive toward this goal by forcing the sociologist to reflect on their respective academic/financial positions (reflexive sociology). In this sense, Bourdieu also wants to bridge the gap between schools of thought such as phenomenology and structuralism. Which essentially means that he intends to utilize a method largely influenced by Levi-Strauss, one that approaches anthropology from a linguistic, structural, objective, and systematic perspective, while keeping in mind the sociologist/anthropologist as individual, one who's subjective perception tends to get in the way of an objective analysis of culture and social organization.
As I've mentioned, this involves a lot of philosophy of scientific method, or philosophy of research methods in general. Which is nice because it distances Bourdieu from influences such as Karl Marx, and brings him closer to the more rational approach of someone such as Max Weber. So Bourdieu is more or less talking about a "sociology of sociology", which so articulately calls for a reassessment of sociological methods of the past while addressing their respective strengths at the same time.
In Other Words is also what seems like a great introduction to Bourdieu's thought. Through the few interviews contained in this volume, he discusses his own academic career and the influences that have contributed to molding what now stands as his own quite inimitable approach. Included in this collection are also a couple of essays in which he discusses the concepts that he is famous for, such as habitus and codification. It's all very illuminating, and very much helpful for those interested in reading some of his more ambitious projects such as Distinction and Homo Acedemicus. In other words, it would be ideal if most great thinkers had a collection as brutally honest and articulate as this one.
Bourdieu still seems to bandy about the word science as if sociology truly was one. Yet his awareness of both what the sociologist means when they say this, as well as the weaknesses of certain influences of his (Levi-Strauss, Durkheim, Weber, Merleau-Ponty, etc) motivates his ideas to step back from themselves and reflect on what sort of foundation of logic and method might stengthen their results. He seems to strive toward this goal by forcing the sociologist to reflect on their respective academic/financial positions (reflexive sociology). In this sense, Bourdieu also wants to bridge the gap between schools of thought such as phenomenology and structuralism. Which essentially means that he intends to utilize a method largely influenced by Levi-Strauss, one that approaches anthropology from a linguistic, structural, objective, and systematic perspective, while keeping in mind the sociologist/anthropologist as individual, one who's subjective perception tends to get in the way of an objective analysis of culture and social organization.
As I've mentioned, this involves a lot of philosophy of scientific method, or philosophy of research methods in general. Which is nice because it distances Bourdieu from influences such as Karl Marx, and brings him closer to the more rational approach of someone such as Max Weber. So Bourdieu is more or less talking about a "sociology of sociology", which so articulately calls for a reassessment of sociological methods of the past while addressing their respective strengths at the same time.
In Other Words is also what seems like a great introduction to Bourdieu's thought. Through the few interviews contained in this volume, he discusses his own academic career and the influences that have contributed to molding what now stands as his own quite inimitable approach. Included in this collection are also a couple of essays in which he discusses the concepts that he is famous for, such as habitus and codification. It's all very illuminating, and very much helpful for those interested in reading some of his more ambitious projects such as Distinction and Homo Acedemicus. In other words, it would be ideal if most great thinkers had a collection as brutally honest and articulate as this one.
August 17, 2008
Another good introduction to Bourdieu's theory, espeacially his "philosophical" aspect.
The first chapter, "Fieldwork in Philosophy", outlines Bourdieu's fundemental concept which is developed and become what we now known as "Theory of Practice": how he breaks with Subjectivism/Objectivism and solve the structure/agency tension. Moreover, in order to understand the "practice", he emphasizes on analyzing agents' action as inseperable from the social space around them, despite the humanism claim of disinterested in the case of artistic field, or of pure knowledge in the case of intellectual fied.
These "breaks", I believe, result in a new way of seeing (and doing) philosophy, literature and science (not to mention social sciences in general). Since most of the chapters included here are the interview sessions, the language is much more penetratacle than of writtern work by Bourdieu himself.
The first chapter, "Fieldwork in Philosophy", outlines Bourdieu's fundemental concept which is developed and become what we now known as "Theory of Practice": how he breaks with Subjectivism/Objectivism and solve the structure/agency tension. Moreover, in order to understand the "practice", he emphasizes on analyzing agents' action as inseperable from the social space around them, despite the humanism claim of disinterested in the case of artistic field, or of pure knowledge in the case of intellectual fied.
These "breaks", I believe, result in a new way of seeing (and doing) philosophy, literature and science (not to mention social sciences in general). Since most of the chapters included here are the interview sessions, the language is much more penetratacle than of writtern work by Bourdieu himself.
December 27, 2008
Probably a good place to start with Bourdieu. It begins with two interviews, then moves on to a variety of essays engaging with specific problems in sociology and related disciplines (economics, anthropology, literature). Also, the great speculative "Programme for a Sociology of Sport" and his inaugural address upon induction to the Collège de France, the vertiginously self-reflexive "Lecture on the lecture." Almost everything in here is pursued at greater length and in greater depth elsewhere in his writing, but _In Other Words_ provides a good sense of Bourdieu's place in the wider sphere of intellectual and academic life.
March 10, 2007
nice collection of bourdieu's essays on reflexive sociology
August 19, 2007
A great place to start.
May 22, 2016
Some easier essays/interviews in here. Good primer for other works.
March 15, 2023
En este libro, compuesto de entrevistas, conferencias y artículos, Bourdieu hace un repaso de los principales temas de su sociología. Aborda el sentido practico, la codificación, el espacio social, el interés, la distinción... También se sitúa en relación al estructuralismo, a la economía, a la etnografía y en cierta medida a la filosofía. Muy buen libro, y junto con Raison pratiques, es una perfecta manera de entender la metodología, las bases epistemológicas y la posición en el espacio del pensamiento de la sociología de Bourdieu.
September 11, 2014
tour de force ma nigga
Want to read
April 11, 2016H59.B66 A3 1990, SSAH
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews